Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#71

Post by gspr » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

alfalfasprout wrote: post #54

reaperducer wrote: post #30

Did it work? Yes. Was it secure? Yes. So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense. If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.

Frankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.

Really? I'm not doubting you, but I'm surprised. I only used them up until I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, but I still vividly remember often having to go through a couple of floppies from my drawer to find one that was working. And yelling at my little brother for putting a bad one back in the drawer.

Are they really that robust? Was I just storing them stupidly maybe? Or maybe it was because all the ones we had were used ones from work.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#72

Post by Osiris » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #34

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

I built a relatively simple system over 10 years ago that ran on PHP and MySQL. Over the years, the company I built the product for has come back to me to upgrade PHP and MySQL after a security scan. The problem is the software was build for PHP 5.4, and they want it running on the latest (7.4). It doesn't.

I managed to get it running on the latest security release of 7.1 with a few days of work (I had to make code changes in the framework I used that weren't supported in PHP 7 anymore). If they want future security upgrades, it's going to require a even more significant rewrite of the software because it relies on old PHP behaviours that have been removed in recent releases.

So, I completely understand why 20 year old systems would still rely on floppy disks.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#73

Post by gbuk2013 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #34

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

I built an invoicing / international shipment documentation generation / stock control / production tracking system with Excel and VBA and it's been in production for close to 20 years! I am conflicted as to whether or not I should be proud of that. ;)

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#74

Post by ceejayoz » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #64

ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect? A better measure is passenger deaths per kilometer. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fatalities_per_reven... It's been on a steady, large decline since the 1970s. Even with the 737 MAX crashes, it's an incredibly safe way to travel. In the last ten years, one passenger has died on a US carrier due…

The 737 Max grounding cost about $18 billion so far (according tot he Google infobox which knows everything and is never wrong.) The high-end estimates of the value of a statistical human life tend to run about $4-8 million, depending who you ask. The FAA grounding of the Max has 2250 has thus cost enough money to save 2,250-4,500 statistical lives, had the money been spent more wisely elsewhere. How does your "bette…

> (And what is it superior to, exactly?)

Pretty much any other form of transit, safety-wise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#United_States

> The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles for 2000 : 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane.

> How does your "better" passenger-deaths-per-km measure account for these deaths?

You propose a silly metric. Car accidents cost $871 billion a year. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/motor-vehicle-crashes-u-...

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#75

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #34

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

Like the parent poster, I've shipped systems that have to be in production and supported for 20+ years, so this isn't surprising.

That said, most of my career has been in embedded systems, so this kind of lifetime isn't really unusual.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#76

Post by kayfox » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #3

While this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/…

There are data loaders in the avionics world that use emulators, including ones which emulate floppies to load off floppy images.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#77

Post by hinkley » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #4

The headline is misleading. According to the story text, the floppy is used to load a new navigation database , which is important to be sure but not a critical software update.

No no, the old airplanes have a binder full of floppies so that any time the plane has wheels on ground, you can reload one of the critical systems without waiting for someone to fly in with replacements.

By the 787 they were working to replace this all with code signing.

ETA: This bears repeating: aircraft have interlocks. There is a sensor that tells you that the plane is parked (wheels on ground) and there are connections, maintenance, and administrative changes that cannot be made unless this is the case.

Nobody is going replace the maps with Rick Astley somewhere over the Pacific at 3 am.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#78

Post by hinkley » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #59

The bigger story in the article is how little security review the software on these planes get > "Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."

The physical floppies use the same chain of custody that any other part of the system use. Every floppy has essentially been signed off dozens of times before it ever sees the insides of an airplane, and there is nowhere between the manufacturer and a flying plane where there isn't a person who is officially in charge of it.

From what I understood, there is (was) a real danger of a part that was used in a stress test ending up in a bin full of spares. So every 'part' has an identifier, responsible parties, and a tagging system that keeps the streams from ever crossing. A floppy is physical, so they just did the same thing.

Imagine trying to convince a bunch of people who have always ever done things physically to use electronic distribution.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#79

Post by hinkley » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

notjustanymike wrote: post #22

lizknope wrote: post #16

The article said the floppy drive is kept behind a locked panel. The article doesn't mention if the updates fit on a single floppy or a stack of 20 floppies. I don't see a fundamental problem as long as the data has checksums to make sure that it transferred successfully. I used to get tons of errors on floppy disks transferring data back in the 90's using Sun workstations and PCs. I started making my own checksums t…

> a stack of 20 floppies Well now I'm having flashbacks of installing "Strike Commander".

I got so much exercise trying to install Slackware from >20 floppies. Disk 5 has read errors. go copy another, start over from disk 1. Disk 8 has a read error.

(By the time I was done I didn't have enough disks, so I had to go to the lab in the middle)

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#80

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

virtue3 wrote: post #49

arethuza wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have built applications that have been around for 10 to 15 years. The only thing that would have been good is to know in advance which ones will last that long - one was a temporary proof of concept!

The jerks always say that it will be 'temporary' and we can redo it later. HAH

This is why at my last job we had a rule that said prototypes could not be shipped as production software. It had to be either completely rewritten, or at least completely code reviewed and the "bad" parts rewritten.